i lecture undergrads at a private collage in europe.

only yesterday i was talking with my lover about how at least 2 people need not be on the course, despite the course needing the funding they bring.

they have neither the passion nor the talent.. their being there is a mystery.

there is an ethical issue.. if people want to study to feed a passion, that´s fantastic and lovely to teach.. teaching people who EXPECT a living is nothing of the sort though.. since regardless of education work will go to the right people in the right place at the right time.

and teaching or taking money from people who simple sit the course out.. well.. makes me uncomfortable.

d

I read with great interest the current debate between Simon Bainbridge, the editor of BJP, Photography lecturers and those in the industry. I am a working professional earning my living from film and TV marketing and publicity photography. I have always been encouraging to students and young photographers and have regularly taken work placements. I also engage regularly by email with those interested in my area of photography providing them with advice and guidance. However I have to say that my overall opinion after several years of doing this and having dealt with tens if not quite hundreds of students is: I am fundamentally amazed at how many lack the basic skills of photography. Four years ago I had two photography graduates come to work for me neither of which had any digital experience at all despite having both completed their photographic degree courses. Incredible!! I was spending more time teaching them then I was working! I also have to say that there seems to be a peculiar attitude common in photography graduates only that the world owes them something and that I should be grateful they are approaching me for work. This for me has become such an issue that when I consider applicants for assistance or work placement I actively avoid those with fine art degrees in photography. But overall there is one thing that depresses me the most with many students and that is the educational establishments really let them down over teaching them business skills. Whether you are a good, bad or indifferent photographer you need some basic accounting and communication skills and this can be taught and should be taught. I have had students that simply will not answer the phone because they are so scared of doing business, they know nothing about tax or invoicing or accounts in general. My overall conclusion is that undoubtedly it would be better to train less students but train those better.

Why are so many courses Recreational?

It would be great to see some professional courses geared towards actual roles in the industry. I studied at the Bournemouth Arts Institute, but it just wasn't for me. I learnt more about art photography through working as a Hand C-type printer, as I was lucky to have some amazing clients. I also learnt a great deal while working in a specialist photo-bookstore.

As the technology advances and new jobs in the business emerge, I feel that colleges are letting students (who want to work in the industry) down by not having a dialogue with business professionals as opposed to visiting lecturers.

Being a successful Practitioner is dependent on how much money you have to start with. Many students simply do not have that privilege. Therefore it is vital to have the right contacts and skillset.

In the film industry it would be ridiculous if everyone who studied film was expected to become a Director.....

The whole industry needs to stop being so selfish and petit-bourgeois, or they will end up on the sideline and the next generation of photographers could be reduced to working as automatons within large internet corporations for the next decade.

Mr Bainbridge said:

“Perhaps our equipment tests should also ignore any defects if the company in question has advertised with us… “

When you write your reviews, you give a reasoned view of the product, discussing both the merits and downfalls of each product. The reviews are given a fair amount of space in the BJP. My opinion, is that you did not do this with your comment on students. The comment filled a small space in your publication, it had no clear facts or statistics, and it came across as one sided and emotive. Of course it was predictable that you would receive such a response, as you wrote nothing more than a soapbox speech.

I am uncertain as to whether you did so as a means of playing devils' advocate, or for another purpose entirely. I am all in favour of discussion on the matter, and I recall Diane Smyth wrote “Finding Your Vocation”, in your 07/05/08 issue where the issue was approached. It was useful to read and well written, with quotes from those within the photo-education industry, and written over two pages, which I felt gave the subject the space and attention it deserved.

If you genuinely want to have the discussion again, then I would be glad to read it in a manner where it is presented as the latter, rather than the former.

I AGREE with BJP and Simon...get another career.....Photography as a profession is DEAD and buried!!!!

I've worked as a professional for 30yrs and now can't make a living from it....i am retraining as a Driving Instructor and Professional Golfer???

I went to college Earling and Birmingham polytechnic in 1976-79 qualified worked in local papers for 10 yrs and Nationals after winning Press Gazette & Canon.."Images of Life award"and ilford awards in 1989...Worked for Daily & Sunday telegraph doing Sports and Features...+ Times and Sunday Express....Then in 1992 moved into PR Marketing and Advertising and corporate work for client like Powergen & BT etc....

I have the skills to use 5x4, medium format, 35mm, DIGITAL one of the first with the D1 in 2000, Darkroom skills in B/w and colour...all of which is no longer any use except Digital (D2x etc)...and even then clients now think a office junior with a camera phone or point and shoot can do 9 out of 10 jobs i did for them only 5 yrs ago.....

My turnover as gone from £120,000 + in 1999 to £18k last yr 2008....This yr offered several jobs between Jan & march worth £3-5k all of which have been canceled or postponed because the Wanker Bankers have made things even worse than they already were....

I even started an Ad agency with a partner 18mons ago so we could sell the whole package and not just photography services but the downturn as closed that idea....also tried wedding work between 2005 & 2007 but not easy to take place of competitors in area who been doing same work for years.....

Suggest all college courses on photography be closed except for one at London College of printing (if still going)....and teach them to use a phone and video and computer because quality images no longer needed...clients and designers also prefer to buy stock images at 5p each from Corbis of Getty that have also destroyed any change of shooting stock images to replace commissioned work which is what i did......

and so on......

Ps Birm College had reunion 10 yrs ago and in my year only 2 of us out of 30 had been working as image makers....the rest never worked in any part of the industry....out of 200+ at do only about 6 were photographers!!!!

yes its tough to make it as a photographer

but unlike most proffessional photographers are not into it just for money. if they are, they fail ... are upset....

its a lifestyle .

cheers

R

I've always remembered a comment made by the late Victor Blackman in his Amateur Photographer column back in the '80s. The gist of it was that if you have to ask how you go about becoming a pro photographer, it's not going to happen.

As a young, impressionable teenager it seemed a rather harsh comment, and I didn't really understand it. Two decades and change later, after more than a decade keeping a roof over my head by taking pictures, I think it's one of the most astute observations I've ever heard.

I'd echo the previous posters' comment about the astonishing lack of basic communication and business skills displayed by many photography students. To be fair, the same is probably true of a great many undergrads in all fields, but in a profession with no career path and very few employers, the ability to set up and run a business is at least as important as the ability to turn in a decent set of images.

The harsh reality of self employment - of any kind, not just photography - is that it demands a large degree of common sense, business savvy and get-up-and-go. Some of this can be taught, but much of it has to be learnt out there in the real world.

Dear Paul France,

It appears that your extensive experience in Photography has taught you very little.

Photography as a profession is NOT dead. I know many people who take average pictures and still make a good living, but the reason they are still very much alive and kicking is because they have learned to adapt to the great changes that we have seen over the past decade. Yes, a lot of "traditional" practices are now not so lucrative, but it has also opened up a lot of new ones.

Now regarding photography courses...

Being a student myself, I have been told to death by my lecturers that it will be extremely hard for me and fellow course mates to get into the industry, as apparently there are too many students graduating than there are jobs. Thing is, from the class of around 30 or so, only few have good technical, conceptual or business skills. It is the same in every course, and only the good ones will go onto having jobs in photographic industry.

All this research assumes that all 30 students from each course will be the same technical standard and have the same motivation, and the truth is very far from that.

The ones that WANT to make it into the industry, who are already building contacts from assisting, creating their business models, designing websites and constantly evaluating the changing market will no doubt have a better chance, than a self taught photographer reading strobist.

A good university course deepens the knowledge in various subjects, not just photography, and provides the tools needed to be more successful than those without further education. However it does not GUARANTEE a job, this is not medicine or law we are studying. The piece of paper for graduating means absolutely nothing, but the skills gained from the 3-year journey are very important.

Try TV. Get a Blu-Ray copy on a decent drive of, say, The Blue Planet, and look at it on a 50 inch Pioneer or Panasonic screen.

Then do the same, on a regular basis with shows of snaps of good work by whoever.

Then watch and rewatch as many great movies as you can.

When you have done this, you may become aware of the competition, because this IS the competition still imagers now face.

The work of many historic photographic figures viewed in this context is flat, dead, and mannered, in a way it would not have been when colleges of photography took off following on from the Bailey boom in the 60s. When Noir et Blanc was so Coool (and noone could afford colour film or equipment and went to college to get both for free- and there were NO fees either)

Colleges can still be an interesting and possibly important places but not with the narrow-minded secondrate staff most are peopled with.

Talent breeds talent. Only talented photographers with experience can pass skills on, in the way a plumber or carpenter or painter or draughtsman does; but huge numbers of colleges are largely staffed by people who often have not ever done anything other than learn as a student in one, and then teach in one- sometimes the same one. This self-perpetuating oligarchy resents talent from outside, resents those who do, or actually have made money from photography, because all they have done is teach.

This was all very well when machines mattered, when using a lightmeter and knowing your way around movements with view cameras was essential, but anyone claiming that there are still rewlevant skills to be learned with an auto everything digital camera and computer software not only lives on another planet, but should be shipped off to Recall straightaway- because there is NOTHING of that sort to be learned in college that I cannot pass on, or my 14 year-old children, to anyone keen to learn in a matter of a few days; and certainly nothing to be awarded a "Degree" for. And that includes camera movements with Mamiya and Sinars and Studio flash. Its easier than using a Wii, and has nothing to do with photography at all, any more than books on technique have,no.

And it is frankly insulting to medical and maths and science students who graft for years that photography students GET a degree of the same value at all. And so we get degrees in waffle, in "Film Studies" and in this airy fairy area that is real Emporers New Clothes stuff. It does not have a name but features heavily in worded job descriptions for all teaching posts and usually is "defined" with several paragraphs of Mandelsonian Institute semiotic idiotic spin, hilarious really, which some grebe actually gets paid to write!! and to which you must as wordily commit in your application: the Void answering the Void!

WE are not into words: and there lies the problem - of perversion of vision by literary means.The better you are at it, the higher up the salary scale you are likely to be! What Ken Clark called "the Triumph of the Mediocre".



Apprenticeships get very often better results in situations in which you are only as good as your last shoot, and only commissioned for more if the client- whether an agency, gallery, magazine or newspaper, or TV channel is satisfied.Good, more work, bad, no more work.

In France in the early 90s most provincial newspapers had already sacked all their photographers and replaced them with one staffer who captured news and sports stills of a TV monitor in the office, with a machine fixed in front of a television on a tripod in, presumably,a darkened room.

The wholesale piracy of all online images by huge organizations with the ability to decode and uprez even the poorest and most compressed images- and then sell them to countries where their creators (love that word!) cant trace them, now means that anyone seeking to become known, risks losing everything of value to them before they have made a single penny.

You can only make photographs,and the more often you try the better you'll get at it, but what goes with that is Love.

By Love I mean compassion and integrity. Actual joy in recording what you love most about being here is key.Being alive of course- having consciousness created within you that beats your heart and fills your lungs and clicks your buttons! For which we are, none of us responsible, and which so few ever really appreciate or record.............

I love people pictures. It may be vanity- myself in infinite mirrored reflections, at different ages and stages of life in different costumes and colours of skin in all weathers and climates, but I love people and that translates on occasion, with "luck", into good results.

You cannot teach that, you have to BE that, and you CAN absorb it IF you love your teachers. You just will.

But your teachers ARE your subjects, whether a model, a caterpillar on a twig, swirling starlings, or orchids, or sports fans or shoppers. Not guys in colleges with teaching degrees at all- unless you want to make a series of portraits of them, of course.!

So find whatever really does it for you and just keep taking the pictures!!

That is the philosophy of vision. And it is not a job

This is an interesting thread.

I learnt photography through assisting for years after doing a business studies course.

I have used a number of students as assistants, on the whole they tend to be completely unfamiliar with equipment and lighting techniques, these students have all come from a respected creative college.

It became clear after one of these students started telling me about how brilliant one of their tutors was, it turns out that this tutor had been a bus driver for years and had been a photographer for 2 before he became a tutor.

enough said

Would be nice if the Universities and College courses gave more than a passing nod to the need to learn how the BUSINESS side of the industry works.

Out pops another thousand "visually creative" students clutching a grad certificate with absolutely no clue whatosever HOW to charge for their work. I mean, who goes for a job not knowing how many hours work they need to do and what the salary is?

Loved by publishers and agencies who grab the wet behind the ears newbies and swipe their IP with terms like "day rate" and "all rights" while pretending that actually, they ought to be grateful they've been "discovered".

It's from this paradox we get the term "starving artist". Because unless you learn how to exercise your right to sell your work via the form of licencing and not a "day rate" you'll never make any money in this game at all.

So come on tutors. You're all very quick to "sell the dream". How about you tell your students how they respond to a rights grab or someone wanting "all rights" or how you'd price a pan-European advertorial campaign in a mag with a circ of 25k?

Making money from images is entirely possible if you don't walk into it like some two year old walking into a sweet store. Its a business. If you want to make pretty pictures and not worry about the business side you too can be a "starving artist".

PP

I studied photography with 30 other students, graduating in 2000. Out of those 30, only 5 have actually made a living out of it, and 3 of those are newspaper photographers, not self employed.

The group who graduated the year before had the same number, but only 2 are doing it alone.

I had to do some extremely hard slog, even going as far as moving from Australia to London to get my foot in the door as an assistant. Best thing I ever did, but it needed commitment and the ability to think on ones feet; not expecting it all to land in my lap just because I'd finally graduated from college.

The one thing I'd have really liked was a better idea of how to do the business side of things; heading out with no idea does not bode well for newer photographers or seasoned ones. How many times have you heard about another photographer who got the job because they low-balled everybody else? Teaching the "real" business of photography rather than "small business" would have helped greatly.

And self promotion/marketing would have been a wonderful topic to be covered as well.

Many of the students I graduated with came out of the course fully confident they'd land a job within a few months - non of them realised that it would take a lot of hard work and possibly the need to start at the bottom (possibly moving to another country)to work their way up to where they envisaged themselves upon graduation.

Their lack of foresight, high expectations and lack of tenacity is probably why they haven't continued along the professional photography path.

This is the introduction for exhibition at The Photographer's Gallery

"Discover bright new talent at our second annual exhibition of graduate photography. freshfacedandwildeyed09 recognises the immense breadth and dynamism of graduate and post-graduate photographic work emerging from colleges and universities across the UK each year."

I would like to know what people think about these images. I have been asked to teach at a college but they require a MA, I have to question some of the current instructors and what is a point of getting an MA in photography to teach?

Photography student

Interesting debate. It seems noteworthy that the majority of posts are from people who have, at some point, made a decent amount of money from photography. But maybe that's the difference: the ones with the balls, intelligence and passion to think about the implications of this argument are the ones that succeed. If my schooling was anything to go by, the photography students were the ones who weren't particularly academic, and didn't fancy taking up the other options.

The saturation of the market by crap graduates is not due to the industry, nor the colleges, it's due to the increasing notion that further education leads to employment. The kids who can't be bothered to take a 'boring' subject like maths or history will tend to fall back on photography and the creative arts, because hey, 'a degree's a degree'. Obviously, this is not an attitude that will get you any kind of decent job, let alone one in a competitive industry.

None of this is to say that non-academics can't be photographers; quite the opposite. But like everyone here seems to agree, photographers need to be a particular breed to succeed. As colleges become more swamped with soft-willed, idealistic students who are just after the paperwork, of course the employment statistics of graduates is going to plummet.